What went wrong, what went right, what are we now?

Its Wed. By now you should be able to read this. I've joked in other posts about how bad we are, or at least alluded to it. But lets realize one thing. This is a game of matchups. Until we get a BIG athletic center, this team is ALWAYS going to struggle against a 3-4.

This was the perfect storm really. Why did Sanchez look so good against us? We let him get in rythem. We had opportunites to shut him down. I can think of three picks he could have thrown of the top of my head, that we just didn't make the play. It is a change, for the Texans, to even be in position to make a play like that, we just failed to take advantage. If you make that play, he doesn't get to build confidence, this game has an entirely different result. From that point we started a death spiral, and honestly we saw our old nemisis creep up again.

This team's inability to stop the bleeding after a negative play is unbelievable. Whether it was Steve's fumble, or the blown coverage on Stuckey, we just don't recover well. While Sanchez is busy building confidence we're doing nothing to combat the blitz. Hey, how about no huddle? Wear their defense out and get some time to throw the ball. Prevent the subsititutions on their end? That I attribute to bad coaching. The center/guards not being able to handle their DT is a huge problem vs the 3-4 and we will get killed by any team (remember Baltimore) with a decent core of lb's if they are willing to send the blitz.

Mario, Diles and Robinson (I think) all had chances to pick the ball off... good chances, and failed. If you get to him early you turn the game around. Instead we do absolutely NOTHING to slow them down. If they are going to blitz on 2nd and long and 3rd and long, throw on first down... no huddle. We did nothing to match up to them all night. Instead of taking the ball away from them, we gave them momentum when we turned the ball over and they ran with it. Then the blown coverage, this kid gets to throw his first td before his first int... the last thing you want is a kid that doesn't know he isn't ready.

Meanwhile, we did nothing to disrupt their rythm. If we're not extending drives, they get a chance to settle in, and we definately gave that to them. Look we're going to struggle against these 34 teams, so we're going to have to get creative. I'm not really concerend about building to play the 34 at this point because our division isn't dominated by 34 play, but you need a few gimiks in the bag to slow down that pass rush.

Defensively, I thought we looked decent. Our 3rd down play was terrible, but it looked like we were confused on several plays. I attribute that to the fact that we had 2 guys who had never played in this defense (Daunta/Cushing) and a CB playing safety. FTR our DL looked better than it has in some time in the first half. I don't know exactly what happened on that TD pass to Stuckey, but it looked to me like blown coverage (not sure if Bennet was supposed to help out but it looked like Mcain's hands on his head said it all). We got pressure we just didn't make him pay when he threw the ball poorly.

Its not nearly as bad as it seems. I'm gonna wait till week 17 to say how many games we'll win.. ok I wanna see what we do next week but if you pinned me down I'd have to say 9 is the magic number.